There are situations where making judgments about people based on limited information is not only accepted but required. One of those situations is open adoption, where birth mothers actually choose the adoptive parents for their child.

Two people see one of President Trump’s first executive orders and get excited, and then get to work. (30 minutes)

When Yousef Hammash left Gaza a year ago, his sisters decided to stay behind.

Editor Nancy Updike tries to make sense of this current moment by talking to a master of dark comedy, Armando Ianucci. (19 minutes)

Producer Zoe Chace compares the letters a person gets and the letters they wish they got.

Yousef does not even want to think about leaving Gaza. (18 minutes)

Reporter M. Gessen talks to Russians living in America and elsewhere about the lists the Russian government has put them on in the last few years.

Elena Kostyuchenko tells the story of how she was probably poisoned after reporting on Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, and how she kept not believing it was happening. Bela Shayevich translated this story from Russian and reads it for us. (21 minutes)We adapted this from an article in n+1 magazine.

Tim Reeves runs a hospital in rural Pennsylvania, and he’s trying to do something that is so hard to do and that he knows is completely up to him.

Guest host Nancy Updike talks about learning something new, and unpleasant, about herself in, where else, a makeup store. She also talks with other people about moments where someone made an observation about them that was shocking.

Russian forces have besieged the town of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. Shelling is constant.

One evening last fall, Rachel McKibbens got a text from her younger brother, Peter. It read: “I’ve been too distraught to tell you, but Dad passed away today at 2:42 p.m.” She had no idea her father had even been sick, and no idea that her brother was also dying.

We hear a phone call from this week between Kirk Johnson in California, and Ajmal, a man standing in a canal outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Kim Jong-Il loved movies, but hated all the movies made in North Korea. So he kidnapped a famous South Korean director and his ex-wife—a South Korean film star—locked them up in a villa in North Korea, and forced them to make movies for him. Nancy Updike tells the story.

Producer Nancy Updike talks to her friend Mary Conway about the strangest-looking trophy she got in her years playing basketball.

We start with someone getting up the nerve to do something that really, it would be nice to see more often — an apology. And not just any apology.

With flames moving in from all sides during the Northern California fire, an entire town flees—except for four friends who’ve lived there since childhood. Producer Nancy Updike on what they do next.

The story of a con man, one of the most successful salesmen in a long-running multimillion-dollar telemarketing scam, who finally got caught when he was conned himself. Producer Nancy Updike talks about the case with Dale Sekovich, Federal Trade Commission investigator.

Reporter Nancy Updike spends two days with Neal Smither, who cleans up crime scenes for a living, and comes away wanting to open his Los Angeles franchise, despite the gore — or maybe because of it.

There is one line in the executive order that justifies its existence. It’s the second sentence in section 1.

Nancy returns with a story that explains the origins of the special visa program for interpreters. A decade ago, a young guy named Kirk Johnson inadvertently became the point person for American policy about the Iraqis and Afghans endangered by their work for us.